In this age of computers and the Internet, organizations and individuals are incessantly inundated by a plethora of information. For organizations, much of the information is communicated in the form of electronic mail (referred to herein as “e-mail” or “email”). Since its introduction as a form of communication, emails have become one of the most preferred methods of communication, often preferred over phone calls, meetings, etc. As a result, a significant portion of an employee's workday is spent in reading, writing, and organizing emails.
The increased use of email also means that more and more information, of all types, is communicated and memorialized in the form of emails. This makes email an important part of electronic documents for organizations, requiring organizations and employees to pay more attention to policies and procedures related to archival of emails. As email systems continue to grow, more and more companies are turning their attention to email management. Moreover, legal departments are increasingly focused on e-discovery, record managers want email records under control, and management experts want emails to be compliant with industry and other regulations. This is especially true in view of various new regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandates specified levels of document management and archival by companies. Furthermore, electronic documentation discovery has become an increasingly important part of lawsuits, as exemplified by the increasing number of legal cases being determined based on information communicated over emails. This adds additional pressure on organizations to come up with a coherent and comprehensive email management policy.
Organizations have generally reacted to such needs in one of two manners. Some organization end up with an over-reactive electronic document retention policy that requires keeping all electronic documents, including all emails, for a long time, sometimes forever. In such a case, every single piece of email, including emails between employees and their friends and families, etc., end up being stored as part of archive. Such overly cautious document retention policy results in email inboxes and archival systems becoming too large. Furthermore, it becomes overly costly and time consuming to find any relevant information from such “save everything” document archive.
On the other hand, various other organizations implement a policy that mandates employees to remove most of the emails, at least from their in-boxes. Generally, under such policies, companies set quotas in the form of size of email that can be saved in in-boxes, often at several megabytes (MBs). Such an overly strict “save nothing” type of email management policies often result in inconvenience to employees as they have to constantly keep cleaning their email in-boxes. Moreover, as employees are forced to constantly clean out their emails, they often end up deleting emails without reading or deleting emails that are important for the organizations. As expected, such policies often end up being counterproductive and may cause problems at a later stage when it becomes almost impossible to find information that is important to organizations and their employees.
Thus, there is a need for a method and system that assists organizations and employees in managing their emails in an efficient and effective manner.